From Commodity to Choice: Why Your Business Needs a Communications Strategy

🔥 Excerpt

“Every purchase from big to small is a trust based purchase.”

⚡ TL;DR

A strong communications strategy gives a business a way to build trust, establish differentiation, and create consistency across marketing, public relations, sales, and every other point where customers and stakeholders encounter the company. Joshua Altman explains how businesses can move beyond looking like interchangeable commodities.

📄 Show Notes

When customers see ten businesses offering essentially the same service, the decision often comes down to something that is harder to measure than price or features: trust.

That is where a communications strategy becomes a business function rather than simply a marketing activity.

Joshua Altman, a fractional chief communications officer, works with small businesses, startups, and growing companies that often have pieces of communications already in place. There may be a social media manager, a marketing assistant, an advertising agency, an SEO provider, or a PR firm. The problem is that these activities can exist independently without anyone responsible for making sure they communicate the same idea.

Joshua’s role is to bring those pieces together around a unified direction. Marketing, public relations, media relations, internal communications, and external messaging all contribute to how people perceive a company. When they operate independently, the business can unintentionally send conflicting signals. When they work together, every channel has a clearer purpose and reinforces the same underlying message.

This becomes particularly important when a company is trying to escape commodity pricing.

There may be dozens of competitors offering similar services, with different names and logos but little meaningful distinction in the customer’s mind. Being technically capable is not necessarily enough to command a premium price. The market needs a reason to understand why one company occupies a particular position.

Joshua approaches this through the relationship between story, narrative, and brand. The story establishes what has happened. The narrative helps people understand what those events mean and what they should conclude. The brand then carries that meaning across the many ways people interact with the company.

That last point is easy to overlook. A brand is not limited to a logo or website. It includes the chatbot, printed materials, conference presence, customer communications, and even details such as hold music. Each interaction contributes to the customer’s impression of the organization. A company presenting itself as modern and innovative can create an unintended disconnect if its customer experience communicates something entirely different.

A thoughtful communications strategy also has to connect with sales.

Communications may not directly close the sale, but it creates many of the conditions that make a sale possible. Sales teams rely on messaging, collateral, positioning, content, reputation, and customer confidence. When communications leadership understands the sales pipeline and product roadmap, it can begin preparing the market before a product or service is formally introduced.

The same principle applies to trust.

Joshua points out that customers are increasingly sensitive to whether the information they encounter feels genuine. Businesses can produce enormous amounts of content, particularly with AI making production easier, but volume does not automatically create credibility. Inauthentic content can weaken trust even when the underlying business is legitimate.

Search is becoming part of this equation as well. Joshua explains that businesses need information they publish themselves as well as third party validation that supports those claims.A communications strategy therefore sits at the intersection of reputation, positioning, trust, content, sales enablement, and customer experience. Its purpose is not simply to produce more messages. It is to make sure the messages a company is already sending work together.

For a business that looks interchangeable from the outside, that coherence can become a meaningful source of differentiation. The goal is to give customers enough clarity and confidence to understand what makes the company worth choosing.

That is how communication becomes part of the business itself rather than an activity added around it.

✅ Key Takeaways

• A communications strategy aligns marketing, PR, internal messaging, media relations, and external communication.
• Businesses can become commodities when customers cannot clearly understand their distinctive value.
• Story, narrative, and brand work together to shape how a company is understood.
• Every customer touchpoint contributes to brand perception.
• Communications should be connected to sales, product development, and strategic planning.
• Authentic content strengthens trust while disconnected messaging can weaken it.
• First party content and third party validation both contribute to discoverability and credibility.
• The purpose of communications is not simply more content. It is greater clarity, consistency, and trust.

👑 Host Info

Rick Meekins (https://rickmeekins.com) is a serial entrepreneur, strategic business disruption advisor, podcast guest, and host of The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast, where he explores what it actually takes to build, lead, and sustain meaningful businesses. With over 30 years of experience working alongside founders and leadership teams, Rick focuses on helping companies develop and implement disruptive advantages and developing platforms to explore and distribute human insight.

Interested in working together, having Rick speak, or partnering with the show?

Start here: https://rpowpodcast.com/contact/

🧭 Chapters

00:00 Why Trust Drives Business Decisions
01:30 What a Fractional Chief Communications Officer Does
05:00 Bringing Fragmented Communications Together
07:00 Communications, Search, and Third Party Validation
09:30 Building Trust Through Authentic Content
14:00 Connecting Communications With Sales
18:00 Preparing the Market for What Comes Next
23:00 Creating a Clear Brand Position
27:00 Moving Beyond Commodity Positioning
30:00 Story, Narrative, and Brand
35:00 Making Every Customer Touchpoint Count

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